A song for Nora Barnacle: ‘James Joyce wouldn’t have been the writer he was without her’ By using this website, you consent to our use of cookies. For more information on cookies see our Cookie Policy . X A song for Nora Barnacle: ‘James Joyce wouldn’t have been the writer he was without her’ Shaun Davey and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill have written a song cycle to recount the story of Joyce’s wife and muse Thu, Jun 11, 2015, 01:00 Siobhan Long ‘It wasn’t difficult to be inspired by Nora’s words, imagining what she would be saying and how annoyed she must have been so often by Joyce’. Above, Nora Barnacle Patrick Kavanagh extolled the virtues of a world where “life pours ordinary plenty”. Such mundane routines were alien to the life of Nora Barnacle, James Joyce’s muse, lover and eventual wife. Theirs was a stormy relationship, characterised – at least in the early years – by an intense eroticism, chronicled so majestically in Ulysses through the character of Molly Bloom.

Now, more than six decades after her death, Barnacle’s story will be recounted through a sweeping song cycle called simply Nora Barnacle, composed by Shaun Davey and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and sung by Rita Connolly. It was the intriguing portrait of Barnacle on the cover of Brenda Maddox’s 1988 biography, Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom, that first intrigued Davey. “I’ve always been interested in songs of a biographical nature,” he says. “I like the idea of songs that are photographs of other people’s lives. Then, there’s always the opportunity for overlap between one’s own experience and the experience of the person you’re doing a portrait of. So songs for me are much more interesting when they’re musical portraits.” At the heart of this collaboration between Davey, the composer; Ní Dhomhnaill, the poet; and Connolly, the interpreter, is a fascination with Barnacle’s life and her influence on Joyce’s writing.

The fact that the infamous couple’s lives intersected with two world wars, exile in Europe and a family dynamic that featured alcoholism (Joyce and his son, Giorgio), mental illness (daughter Lucia) and passions riding high added fuel to the creative fire. Innate musicality Despite Davey’s fascination with Barnacle, he was anxious about his ability to do justice to these historical figures. It was Ní Dhomhnaill’s words that set the project on its ultimate trajectory. At the heart of her writing is what Davey characterises as Ní Dhomhnaill’s “innate musicality”. ADVERTISEMENT She has her own view on what makes this musical partnership work.“I’m not precious about the words,” she says. An unlikely pronouncement from a poet, surely? “Shaun can do whatever he likes with them. If I were writing a poem, it would be much more my personal fiefdom: don’t change a word or I’ll kill you. But this is a completely different kind of writing and you have to leave lots of space for the music. I grew up singing sean-nós songs, so I understand that.” Davey is quick to demystify the compositional process too.

“Writing music is a bit like catch of the day. You don’t know what’s in you. But it was Nuala’s instinctive feel for Nora’s west of Ireland speech patterns that coloured much of the music.” Hiberno-English Ní Dhomhnaill’s first language is English, and she learned Irish on her return to Ireland from England as a child. She never learned to speak English as most Irish people do, using Hiberno-English, with sentence structures reflecting a translation from Irish. It was Hiberno-English Barnacle primarily used. “I could spend my time thinking of these phrases and how wonderful they are,” she says. “‘You have me killed: táim marbh agat.’ A Dubliner wouldn’t say that but someone from the west of Ireland would. You can hear the cadences of Nora’s speech, especially in Finnegans Wake, which makes no sense unless read aloud. It’s a river of sound, and the musical patterns of it are very much west of Ireland.

So it wasn’t difficult to be inspired by Nora’s words, imagining what she would be saying and how annoyed she must have been so often by Joyce.” This was Davey and Ní Dhomhnaill’s ultimate challenge: to reimagine the words of Barnacle, most of whose letters were destroyed. In some ways, this void was what gave them the creative space they needed. “I suppose we’re really describing Nora’s life in letter or postcard form,” Davey says. Connolly knew that simplicity had to be at the core of whatever music would emerge. “The challenge was to keep it simple, because Nora was simple,” she says. “She wasn’t an intellect. She was very intelligent, but she wasn’t educated in the same way Joyce was. She didn’t have an awful lot of time for intellectuals, and we wanted to keep it in her voice.” It was Barnacle who grounded Joyce, Ní Dhomhnaill says. “She was the rock; his emotional centre.” Her multiple contradictions provide more pause for thought. She seemed so free in terms of her sexuality, and yet, as Connolly observes, she was very old-fashioned in her loyalty to her man.

She was a feminist in some ways, an adventurer, exuding what might be called in Irish “taispeach” (or “ballsiness” today). “She was a frontierswoman except she went the other direction,” Connolly says – and this from a woman who’s no stranger to the portrayal of strong female characters herself, having brought the mythical Grace O’Malley to life in Davey’s 1985 suite Granuaile. Connolly is hopeful that the songs will shed a light on Nora’s life and might in some way right some wrongs that have been done to her over the years. “Nora deserves a place beside Joyce,” she says. “He wouldn’t have been the writer he was without her. People need to recognise that.” Nora Barnacle premieres at the National Concert Hall on Bloomsday, June 16th, at 8pm.

Tickets €25/€20, nch.ie New musical celebrates James Joyce’s muse, his wife Nora Barnacle (VIDEOS) | IrishCentral.com New musical celebrates James Joyce’s muse, his wife Nora Barnacle (VIDEOS) Dermot McEvoy / Nora Barnacle and James Joyce I first came across Jonathan Brielle and “River Liffey” in June 2008 when I returned to my hometown of Dublin to report on the festivities surrounding Bloomsday, James Joyce’s magical June 16, 1904 , the day that his novel Ulysses takes place. It was at the Joyce Center on North Great Georges Street in the Georgian townhouse where much Joyce memorabilia is displayed, including the door to Leopold Bloom’s #7 Eccles Street.

In an upstairs drawing room, Brielle stood at a microphone with two American actors and sang many of the songs from the musical he was working on, "Himself and Nora." The signature song of the play, “River Liffey”—it features Italian students learning English from their teacher, Joyce—immediately caught the imagination of the audience ( listen here ): River Liffey, River Liffey… Howth, Rush, Bray, Armagh, Omagh Nenagh, Donegal, Derry, The sweet sound I know Ireland! Ireland My Ireland…The sweetest sound I know…IRELAND! There just seemed to be something musical about all the names of all the Irish counties and the River Liffey,” Brielle told IrishCentral. “There is something hidden in the sounds, the vibrations created by air, over tongue and lips are almost magical. It evokes a feeling, the way Ireland feels to me. The Gaelic names have a rhythm when put together. The language does the work, not me.” 3 Jonathan Brielle Ireland, today, loves to promote her writers. They have named new bridges over the Liffey for Joyce, O’Casey and Beckett.

The irony is that is that all three writers, because of the suffocating censorship of the Catholic Church—abetted later by the new Irish Free State government—left Ireland in disgust. Of course the one who started this 20th century exodus was none other than James Joyce himself. After meeting Nora Barnacle on Nassau Street on June 16, 1904 they decided to leave Ireland that fall and except for short visits back to Dublin in 1909 and 1912, Joyce never set foot in Ireland again. They wandered from Trieste to Zurich before settling in Paris after the First World War. It seems that Brielle was seduced into Joyce’s world through one Leopold Bloom. “Although not being Irish, but raised Jewish,” said Brielle, “I imagine myself as another of Joyce’s Bloom, the lead character of his Ulysses, and the story goes that Joyce’s inspiration for Bloom was the following: Before Joyce met Nora, he was wandering the streets of Dublin, and drank so much he passed out on the street. Apparently, a nice Jewish fellow carried him home.

To repay the kindness, Joyce made the lead character of Ulysses Jewish (as well as probably wanting to show the Church you didn’t have to be Catholic to be a real Dubliner). So if I am Bloom, I have felt that my job was to give Nora the credit that Joyce wished he had given her but that the world never got to hear. And to prove the point, there is a letter from Joyce to Nora that says: ‘Everything that is noble and exalted and deep and true and moving in what I write comes, I believe, from you.’ ” The complicated relationship between Joyce and Nora—much more love than hate—is the foundation for Himself and Nora. “I was slowly seduced by Joyce,” says Brielle. “Hearing his words out loud seemed musical to my ear. The sound of his words introduced me to Dublin and Ireland. He inspired me to visit Ireland many times. I began to explore on so many levels. But what fascinated me more than his work, was the man. “And then, I ‘met’ Nora,” says Brielle, clearly smitten. “Nora Loora Lei.

She, too, seduced this writer and after studying what was written about the two of them, I began to easily imagine their everyday lives: She: this fiery, country girl from Galway, who had never gone past 8th grade and yet managed an acerbic, colorful wit that inspired him. He: the egotistic exasperating, intellectual writer from Dublin whose words would awaken the world. It seemed crystal clear that they were this great couple who had many fights, and always made up with great sex. For me, that struck a chord. However, the big ‘ah-hah’ moment for me, came after I discovered Joyce died fifteen minutes before Nora got back to his hospital room in Zurich in 1941. The musical became the missing 15 minutes I imagined she wanted. For it was always James Joyce and Nora. Never Nora first… hence the title… and the title song.” Brielle did extensive research on Joyce so he could get a clear handle on his subject. “From a factual standpoint, Richard Ellmann’s biography (James Joyce) was my starting point; he was Joyce’s first and greatest background source. It is a polite book, however.

I found more emotion, and an everyday quality, in his brother Stannie’s book (My Brother’s Keeper), as well as Brenda Maddox’s biography, Nora. But the more I read, the more I wanted to know all the people he hated and loved (and vise versa). So I continued to read books about his daughter Lucia, his benefactor Harriet Weaver, and his publisher, Sylvia Beach.” The road to Off-Broadway has been a long one. “We started at the Old Globe in San Diego staring Matt Bogart,” recalled Brielle. “We took it to Dublin twice for Bloomsday at the invitation of the James Joyce Center there. First year, I presented highlights of the show performing Joyce with two other actors. The Center was standing room only and I got to sing underneath the painting of John Joyce, James’ father. Quite a thrill, people were overflowing on to the street. The following year I brought Matt and we performed a concert reading in a theater in Dundrum, a suburb of Dublin. In 2012 we did a full production at NYMF (New York Music Theater Festival) to great critical acclaim and were offered a record deal from JAY Records with John Yap, and another full production.

American Theatre Group produced us in 2013 to rave reviews and our CD came out in 2014. On June 6, we open at the Minetta Lane in the heart of Greenwich Village—the Village for me being the spiritual home of writers and artists the way Montmartre was for Paris.” 3 Matt Bogart and Whitney Bashor as James Joyce and Nora Barnacle. Could the Off-Broadway premiere lead to a Broadway production? “We are thrilled to be in the Minetta Lane,” said Brielle. “It is in the artistic heart of New York. If it makes sense to move, we would look for an intimate theater.

We certainly have a Broadway team right now: We have an amazing orchestra, a Broadway musical director, James Sampliner as well as Broadway stars and veterans including Matt Bogart as Joyce (Jersey Boys, Miss Saigon), Whitney Bashor as Nora (Bridges of Madison County), Zachary Prince (Honey in Vegas) in several roles including the priest, Lianne Marie Dobbs who plays five characters, and Michael McCormick (Elf, Curtains, Chaplin).” Among the historic characters in the musical are Joyce’s financial patron Harriet Weaver and Joyce’s greatest publicist, the eccentric and often irrational poet, Ezra Pound. In one of the funniest and most nimble songs, “All Expenses Paid,” Brielle reached far back into vaudeville as Pound tries to get Weaver to subsidize Joyce’s flamboyant lifestyle. “There is a wonderful vaudeville routine by Gallagher and Shean. (Mr. Shean was Grouch Marx’s uncle),” recalls Brielle.

“Joe Hardy suggested I listen to them and from that came the idea for ‘All Expenses Paid.’ It takes a tremendous amount of practice to pull off, as some Vaudeville routines do, and I enjoy singing both parts at the same time for parties and fun and on the occasion I perform at Birdland.” Of course, when dealing with Joyce and Nora there is a lot of innuendo and double entendres and outright declarations about sex, such as “Compatriots in Lust.” Did Brielle have any concerns about being too explicit in some of the lyrics? “No,” said Brielle definitively. “I approached it like the old Bugs Bunny cartoons, or old Groucho Marx routines. As I kid I thought they were hysterically funny. Only when I was older did I understand all the meanings. Part of the fun of the musical was to show all of their sexual colors through wit and pun—as you know, Joyce loved a good pun. In fact, a great misconception of Joyce was that he was this serious writer, when in fact, he loved nothing more than creating a good laugh—and I believe, he and Nora shared that laugh through their chemistry as well.” Brielle also wanted to throw a bouquet to his indefatigable producer.

“Cherie King has been watching the growth of Himself and Nora since the Old Globe,” Brielle said. “She’s known my process, struggles and successes intimately, and coincidentally, we’ve been married since the Old Globe Production. After a few broken promises from other producers, Cherie more than anyone, believed it needed to be seen, understood what it could become, and so, ‘yes I said yes, I will yes!’ ” Himself and Nora began previews May 14 at the Minetta Lane Theater (off 6th Avenue between Bleecker and West 3rd Streets). The premiere will be on June 6. For ticket information go to HimselfAndNoraMusical.com . --- Dermot McEvoy is the author of the The 13th Apostle: A Novel of a Dublin Family, Michael Collins, and the Irish Uprising and Irish Miscellany (Skyhorse Publishing).

He may be reached at [email protected] Nora Barnacle's House - Hostel Galway city centre Ireland, KinlayHostel Galway city centre Ireland, Kinlay by Frank032012 While it’s true the buildings of Galway do make up a large part of its history, with their differing architecture and powerful presence, this blog has so far neglected one of the most important aspects of the city’s history – the people. For every ornate carving or ruin of city wall, there is the story of the person who made it or lived in it. Judging by the kind of people that are in Galway in the present day, the ones centuries ago must have been quite the characters! But there is one particular landmark in Galway city which is so linked with its former inhabitant that it in fact still bares her name. That place is of course the Nora Barnacle House on Bowling Green, a two minute walk from the end of Shop Street, across from St. Nicholas’ Church. Nora Barnacle could indeed be one of the most influential figures in Irish writing, and those of you with literary leanings have probably come across the name before.

Nora Barnacle was the wife of James Joyce, the celebrated Irish writer who was a leader in the European avant-garde movement. She was often cited as his muse, several characters in his books being based off her and her experiences. Perhaps the best known of these characters is Molly Bloom, wife to Leopold Bloom in the odyssey Ulysses. Her famous words, “yes I said yes I will Yes” finish off the marathon novel, a wonderful tribute to Nora herself, a woman of ambition and certainty in Joyce’s eyes. In fact, the date on which Ulysses is set, June 16 1904 (now called Bloomsday) is that of their first date. It is clear she had a huge influence upon his work and supported him in his creative efforts, which wasn’t always easy in a relationship fraught with poverty and alcoholism on Joyce’s part. But she remained true to her name, Joyce’s father proclaiming, “Barnacle; she’ll stick to him” upon hearing Nora’s surname for the first time. But before she became wife and muse to Joyce, she was a native of Galway and every muse has to grow up somewhere.

The house on Bowling Green was Nora’s childhood home where she lived until 1903. Her early life was fraught with hardship before they settled in this house with her mother, uncle and 6 other younger siblings. She had been sent to live with her grandmother, Catherine Mortimer Healy, in 1886 and stayed until 1889, beginning school at this time. By the time she had completed school in 1896, her mother had thrown their father out as a result of his drinking and subsequently separated. In that same year, a teenager called Michael Feeney who she had fallen in love with died of typhoid and pneumonia, followed 4 years later by the death of another boyfriend Michael Bodkin. It was also a fight with her uncle about dating a Protestant boy called Willie Mulvagh which caused her to leave for Dublin in 1903, where she met James Joyce the following year. And this house in Galway city was the hub of all the activity! It was built in the 1800s and consisted of two rooms and a tiny back yard with the ground floor room serving as a kitchen, dining room, and often a bedroom.

Cooking was done over an open fire, in pot ovens and on large griddles. Water was drawn from a pump across the street as the house did not receive its own supply until the 1940s.The upstairs room was a communal bedroom, meaning that all 8 people staying in the house were crammed into 2 floors of the smallest house on the street! Within a year of meeting in Dublin, Nora and James eloped to Europe, where they would eventually settle in Trieste in Italy, far from her native Galway. They would have two children there, Giorgio and Lucia who would visit Ireland and in fact enter into Nora’s old home. In 1909 Joyce in fact met his mother-in-law (even though him and Nora would not actually marry until 1931) Annie Barnacle in the house, penning a letter later to Nora saying how they had been received with open arms. Nora would sadly only ever visit Galway once again, as on this second visit troubles to do with the Irish War of Independence would cause Nora to never want to return.

She ended up settling in Zurich in Germany after Joyce passed away there in 1941, herself dying in 1951 due to renal failure at the age of 67. After Annie Barnacle passed away in 1940, the house became derelict in the following years. In 1987 however, it was purchased by Sheila and Mary Gallagher who turned it into a visitors’ centre. They returned it to its turn of the century condition and over the years thousands of people have visited the landmark. Sadly however, the house will not be open this year to visit due to financial reasons. The house remains with a plaque outside designating it as Nora’s birthplace and any Joyce/arts enthusiasts should still visit – how often do you get to say you stood in the exact same place as one of the world’s most influential writers? The people of a place are what mostly make it unique, and Nora Barnacle is the prime example of this. One little house on an inconspicuous street in a city on the west coast of Ireland is a wealth of historical and artistic inspiration – come to our city and see what other histories you can come across, they’re just waiting to be found!

That’s it again for this week, see you lovely readers again soon! – Martin Review: 'Himself and Nora' | The BroadwayBlog Home > To See or Not To See , Way Off Broadway > ‘Himself and Nora’: A Portrait of the Artist and His Muse ‘Himself and Nora’: A Portrait of the Artist and His Muse June 6th, 2016 Matthew Wexler by Samuel L. Leiter Matt Bogart and Whitney Bashor in ‘Himself and Nora’ (Photo: Matthew Murphy via The Broadway Blog.) What kind of historical figures make the best subjects for biographical musicals? Political leaders and royalty? Musical, theatrical, or cinematic personalities? Religious visionaries? Gangsters? Businessmen? Athletes? Artists? Literary figures? Surely not the latter, as Himself and Nora , the humdrum new musical by Jonathan Brielle, about the career and love life of James Joyce (Matt Bogart, Jersey Boys), makes abundantly clear. Why are musicals, much less celebrated ones, about famous nontheatrical writers so rare?

An Off-Broadway musical about Edgar Allan Poe drew mixed reviews a couple of years ago but how many others—good or bad—can you name? Straight plays (and movies) have not been shy about dramatizing the lives of major poets and novelists, like Emily Dickinson, for example, or that vulpine pair, Virginia Woolf and Thomas Wolfe, but there’s a decided shortage of attempts to turn such beings into subjects for the musical stage. Is it because their lives were too passive (certainly not Hemingway’s, you might argue), or because creating a song list based on a series of best sellers is simply too challenging? Whatever the reason, James Joyce’s life, for all its ups and downs, doesn’t cry out for either dramatization or musicalization, at least not when seen through the prism of this great Irish writer’s 37-year relationship with his beautiful, Galway-born muse and eventual wife, a barely educated but sharply independent chambermaid named Nora Barnacle (Whitney Bashor, The Bridges of Madison County ); the result is only a tad more absorbing than a page of Finnegan’s Wake.

Matt Bogart as James Joyce in ‘Himself and Nora.’ (Photo: Matthew Murphy via The Broadway Blog.) Advertised as “the greatest love story never told,” Himself and Nora (which premiered in San Diego in 2005 and was seen at the 2012 New York Musical Theatre Festival) is a chronologically organized, impressionistic flashback framed by Joyce’s death in 1941, with a priest (Zachary Prince) offering the last rites. In a nod to Joyce’s disgust with Irish Catholicism’s oppressive dictates, the priest appears throughout as an omniscient presence, offering ironic, but largely unenlightening, asides.

Concentrating on Joyce’s relationship with Nora, whom he meets in Dublin in 1904, the book introduces Joyce’s hard-drinking father (Michael McCormick) and dying mother (Lianne Marie Dobbs); offers Joyce multiple opportunities for randy lovemaking with Nora (“Kiss”), on whose colorful (or, perhaps, off-color) language his writing comes to depend; follows the couple into self-imposed exile in Trieste, where Joyce teaches English; touches on his failing eyesight; and celebrates his ultimate success when, with the support of Ezra Pound (McCormick) and Harriet Weaver (Dobbs), Joyce and Nora move to Paris and Sylvia Beach (Dobbs) publishes Ulysses to great, if controversial, success. Joyce and Nora, who have two unstable children, Lucia (Dobbs) and Giorgio (Prince), finally wed in 1931 after 27 years together; naturally, strife and reconciliation ensue. Dutifully dull book scenes, which would benefit from musical underpinning, are blended with songs of varying melodic quality and often clunky lyrics.

The 17 numbers include “Compatriots in Lust,” sung on the lovers’ trip to Italy; “River Liffey,” a Celtic music-inflected list of Irish cities performed as a step dance with Joyce’s students as a (go figure) way of teaching them English; “Stand Fast,” the otherwise saucily feisty Nora’s anthem to her fidelity to the chauvinistic Joyce; “Let’s Have a Drink,” a standard-issue celebration of a well-known Irish habit that, at least, allows for the reading of Joyce and Nora’s erotic correspondence; and “The Grand Himself,” a spirited number in which the solipsistic Joyce celebrates himself. Everybody sings well, especially the big-voiced Bogart and Bashor, although the finest moment comes when Bashor lowers the volume for the simple, sweetly orchestrated “What Better Thing.” Matt Bogart as James Joyce in ‘Himself and Nora.’ (Photo: Matthew Murphy via The Broadway Blog.) Himself and Nora is a musical, not a lecture, but mightn’t it have made sense for something by Joyce to have been read from, discussed, or sung? A song based on Molly Bloom’s monologue in Ulysses might have been fun.

We hear about that book’s censorship problems but, beyond its “obscenity,” the objections are never described, nor are there any mentions of Joyce’s stylistic, linguistic, thematic, or scatological preoccupations. Apart from their inconsistent brogues, McCormick, Prince, and Dobbs do well by their multiple roles; Dobbs—covering six roles (kudos to J. Jared Janas’s wigs)—shows particular versatility. Both leads are polished and talented but the handsome, strapping Bogart is an overly idealized (and theatrical) Joyce. Bashor is more believable as the forthright, uninhibited chambermaid who gives Joyce tit for tat. Paul Tate DePoo III’s simple setting of textured walls and select scenic pieces makes a perfect background for the truly exceptional lighting of Jason Lyons and Amy Clark’s attractive period costumes. Joyce’s most famous disciple gets a passing shout-out in the script. Perhaps, he, too, could be bio-musicalized if you don’t mind waiting for Beckett.

Nora Webster review – Colm Tóibín’s ‘powerful study of widowhood’ | Books | The Guardian Share on Messenger Close In Ireland, there is only one Nora – Nora Barnacle, James Joyce’s wife and muse. From its title outwards, Colm Tóibín ’s new novel is all about Ireland and, in a larger sense, about an important contemporary Irish writer’s relationship with Joyce, whose work still throws such a long shadow across every angle of Irish literary life. Nora Webster, set in an Irish town in the late 1960s, with the Troubles beginning to rumble away like distant thunder beyond the horizon, is about a tough-minded Irish mother and a country morphing, so to speak, from Ulysses to Bloody Sunday. Explicitly, it is a powerful study of widowhood and grief, of a woman in her prime working out how she is going to live without “the love of her life”, her late husband, Maurice Webster, a schoolmaster. Like Brooklyn, Tóibín’s great novel of an Irishwoman’s exile, Nora Webster is animated by a death in the family.

But where Eilis Lacey becomes reaffirmed by her loss, Nora Webster, who is also a strong and intelligent woman, must find a new strength through a more painful, private colloquy with herself. Death, Tóibín seems to be saying, is a bigger bereavement than exile. When Tóibín published Brooklyn, in 2009, he said: “John McGahern taught me that it’s OK to write repeatedly about the same things.” Nora Webster follows Brooklyn, drilling into the Ireland of the author’s memory and imagination, but with the difference that – apart from a package trip to Spain, where she notes “the strange, fetid smell” of abroad – Webster does not leave Ireland . She is, like her people, stuck in a world of priests, petty small-town rivalries and the kind of provincial boredom that is almost redeemed by the torments of frustration. Tóibín shows brilliantly how Nora, imprisoned in her grief and her widowhood, becomes maddened by the tyranny of neighbours’ condolences, and increasingly desperate to escape. Unlike Eilis Lacey, Nora does not cross the Atlantic, she learns to sing.

The discovery of music in her life gives her “a line towards brightness, or some beginning”, writes Tóibín, a master of less is more. At the same time, because he is also exploring Ireland at a crossroads, an infinitely fascinating web of allusion, taut with nuance and subtlety, and because no Irish writer returning to his or her homeland can ever quite step out of Joyce’s shadow, Nora Webster carries a burden of detail missing from Brooklyn. Put simply, Tóibín’s novel contains an awful lot of its author and his resonant sonority. This cuts both ways, good and bad. Tóibín loves his country. Small-town Ireland, especially the remote south-east, where he grew up, is a place to which he often returns in his fiction. It’s a society he understands in his bones and, partly because he has often been exiled from it, one he returns to with relish. Like Joyce, he revels in the particularity of everyday life. When Webster returns to work at Gibneys, the big local employer and “owner of everything”, Tóibín extracts both drama and comedy from her experiences in the accounts department.

Next to Joyce, the other prose-poet of Irish life is the late John McGahern, whom Tóibín strives to emulate in what he has called “the attempt to find truth in the simplest detail”. In Brooklyn, this pared-down narrative strategy was triumphant. Here it is slightly less successful, partly because Tóibín lacks distance from his material, and also because the drumbeat of the Troubles is always in the background. When we are told, en passant, about “Catholics marching for civil rights”, another character remarks: “That’s one scrap I wouldn’t like to be in. There will be no easy way out of that one.” But, as every historical novelist knows, lines loaded with history will always be at odds with the quest for “truth in the simplest detail”. Later, after another reference to “baton-charges”, we hear about the young Charles Haughey and his gun running. Then, towards the end, comes news of Bloody Sunday. All this is so cleverly braided into the widowhood of Nora Webster and her two boys, Conor and the stuttering, damaged Donal, that Tóibín’s considerable narrative gifts successfully navigate the bumpy intersection of the private and the public.

Through the slow personal reawakening of Webster, he finds a subtle way to reflect on Ireland’s need to put its own grief into a larger context. Nora Webster is an Irish love story and a love letter to Irish readers from one of Ireland’s contemporary masters. But it skilfully transcends its source material in a way that will probably recommend it to a much wider audience. When, in the closing pages, Webster burns her late husband’s letters because “they belonged to a time that was over now”, Tóibín’s message is clear. The past is another country. Better to be an exile from regret. The only way for things to “work out”, a recurrent phrase, is to move forward, boats against the current. Review: ‘Himself and Nora’—A Musical Exploration of James Joyce and His Muse | ZEALnyc Please pick a keywork or category to proceed.

Review: ‘Himself and Nora’—A Musical Exploration of James Joyce and His Muse Tweet By Christopher Caggiano, Contributing Writer, July 13, 2016 When I reviewed the new musical Himself and Nora when it was part of the 2012 New York Musical Theater Festival (NYMF), I called the show “promising” and “vibrant.” In retrospect, the show may have benefitted from comparison to the NYMF shows surrounding it that year. Either that, or I had somehow taken leave of my critical senses. Because Himself and Nora, which recently opened for a commercial run Off-Broadway at the Minetta Lane Theatre, somehow seems to have lost any promise or vibrancy in the intervening four years. Himself and Nora—which has book, lyrics and music by Jonathan Brielle—centers around the lusty and tempestuous relationship between famed Irish writer James Joyce and his longtime lover and eventual wife, Nora Barnacle. The danger, of course, in writing a show about one of the greatest writers ever lies in crafting words that do the great man justice, which Himself and Nora patently fails to do.

In fact, the musical reduces Joyce, one of the great thinkers of the 20th century, to a smutty, petulant schoolboy. Beyond the biographical disservice that Brielle does to Joyce, his show fails at even the most basic dramaturgy. At numerous times throughout the production, I found myself asking, “Wait, where are we right now, and how did we get here?” The reasons for the conflicts between Joyce and Nora are frequently unclear. Sure, we’re meant to understand that tension arises from Joyce’s difficulty getting published, and consequently his ability to pay the bills. Joyce also refuses for many years to marry Nora because of his resentment toward the Catholic church. So there’s plenty of conflict to be had in the story, it’s just that the dialogue doesn’t always make it clear what the pair happen to be fighting about at the particular moment. At the end of the show, when Joyce meets his ultimate fate, we’re left to guess as to how exactly it came about. Suddenly he has a pain in his abdomen, and by the end of the next scene he’s bought the farm. Interspersed amid the clunky book are the generic music and lyrics.

Brielle seems to be aiming for an idiomatic Irish sound, but other than a jig here and reel there, the score could just as easily come from Nashville as the Emerald Isle. The dramatic justification and purpose for the songs is often murky. We know that James and Nora are feeling up a storm, but we’re not really clear as to why they’re singing, apart from a few forced dialogue interjections here and there. Brielle’s score suffers from a tiresome case of Really Long Note Syndrome (RLNS), with most songs ending with a performer in sustained belting mode. One real reason to see the show (which was poorly attended at the Saturday night performance I saw) would be to see a fine group of performers doing their damnedest to make Brielle’s show work. Matt Bogart makes for an animated and attractive Joyce, as he did when the show played at NYMF. Whitney Bashor gives the Nora character more depth and drive than Brielle’s writing really deserves. Of particular note in the supporting cast is Lianne Marie Hobbs in a variety of roles, most affectingly as Joyce’s schizophrenic daughter. It’s great to see a NYMF show taking on an afterlife.

But over the years I’ve been attending the Festival, I can think of a number of shows that were far more deserving of a commercial run than Himself and Nora. Cover photo: Matt Bogart and Whitney Bashor in Himself and Nora; courtesy of production _________________________ Himself and Nora. Preview: May 14, 2016; opened: June 6, 2016; closing date: September 4, 2016 at the Minetta Lane Theatre, 18 Minetta Lane, Manhattan. Running time: 2 hours. Book, music and lyrics by Jonathan Brielle. Directed by Michael Bush; music director/piano, James Sampliner; choreography by Kelli Barclay; scenic design by Paul Tate DePoo III, costume design by Amy Clark; lighting design by Jason Lyons; sound design by Keith Caggiono; wig and hair design by J. Jared Janas; production stage manager, CJ LaRoche; general management by DR Theatrical Management; producer, Cherie King; executive producer, R. Erin Craig/La Vie Productions; producer, JonathanRon Productions.

Cast: Matt Bogart, Whitney Bashor, Michael McCormick, Lianne Marie Dobbs and Zachary Prince You may also be interested in: No related posts. Alone at the end: the tragic muse who inspired James Joyce | Books | The Guardian The Observer Alone at the end: the tragic muse who inspired James Joyce A new biography reveals the sad story of the Irish author's only daughter, who fell for Samuel Beckett only to be rejected by him and end up in an asylum for 30 years Vanessa Thorpe , arts and media correspondent Saturday 20 February 2010 19.05 EST Close This article is 6 years old An unprecedented glimpse into the hidden life of Lucia Joyce, adored only daughter of James Joyce, and the lover of Samuel Beckett , has revealed the loneliness of her final years in England. Born to Joyce and his wife Nora Barnacle in 1907 in Trieste, the flamboyant dancer was to be shut away in mental institutions for most of her adult life. Treated by Carl Jung for supposed schizophrenia, she spent her last 30 years in Northampton's St Andrew's hospital for mental diseases, rarely meeting anyone from outside.

"The tragedy was that she had once been so creative and accomplished. She was gentle and kind and it was a very touching visit," said Helen MacTaggart, a Joyce enthusiast who met her one afternoon in 1977 and who took a rare photograph, published here for the first time. "Even her mother hadn't ever visited her. I don't think she spoke to many people." The story of Lucia, which has been guarded carefully by the Joyce estate and by the novelist's grandson, Stephen, has always mystified literary historians and fascinated fans of the writer's work. It was the subject in 2004 of a West End play, Calico, written by Michael Hastings. Yet all documents about her life remain sealed and unavailable to scholars. For some, Lucia is a lost creative ­talent, thwarted in her prime, while for others she is simply the charismatic young girl who witnessed at close quarters the working relationship between two of the greatest ­writers of the 20th century: her father and the playwright Beckett, who worked as Joyce's assistant in Paris in the late 1920s.

The unknown photograph of Joyce's daughter in her room at Northampton has come to light thanks to a biography, out next month, of the aristocrat Violet Gibson, born in Dublin in 1876, who in 1926 attempted to assassinate the Fascist leader Benito Mussolini in Rome. Violet, like Lucia, was later incarcerated in St Andrew's. The graves of the two neglected, ­unconventional women lie close by, and Gibson's biographer, Frances Stonor Saunders, came across details of Lucia's last years during her research. The young Joyce girl, who had a cast in her eye, spent her childhood travelling through Europe until her parents settled in Paris. The author and his daughter were very close and shared a private language that often baffled others and fed into his books. As a young woman, Lucia joined the renowned dancing school run by Raymond Duncan, the brother of the experimental dancer Isadora Duncan. Her performances were well received, but her grip on reality faded when she was rejected by Beckett, who told her that it was her father, not her, that had been the real draw.

When Lucia's hospital visitor, MacTaggart, later told her that she had once met Beckett in Paris, the patient was quick to ask after him. "She asked me privately if I had noticed if he was with anyone. She meant a woman. She was still in love with him. And I do think, as many do, that Beckett had used her," said MacTaggart this weekend. Lucia's behaviour had become erratic by her mid-20s and her father referred to "her King Lear scenes". At the novelist's 50th birthday party in 1932 she threw a chair at her mother and so her brother, the musician Giorgio Joyce, took her to an asylum. Following the death of her father nine years later, Lucia was left inside Nazi-occupied France in an institution at Ivry, near Paris, and was later moved to Northampton at the age of 43, where Beckett visited her once. When MacTaggart visited her in 1977 she found the hospital "quite sinister". "It was not a nice place to be," she recalled. "Lucia talked a lot and I got the impression she did not see enough people.

She smoked non-stop and had quite a guttural, European accent, not an Irish lilt." After the visit MacTaggart sent Lucia some writing materials she had asked for, but promptly received a letter from a nurse telling her not to do so again. When Beckett visited St Andrew's in the early 1950s he said he thought it a peaceful, domesticated place and an enviable escape from the troubles of life. Lucia died there in 1982. The Woman Who Shot Mussolini, by Frances Stonor Saunders, is published next month by Faber James Joyce To Nora Barnacle Home > Letters James Joyce To Nora Barnacle Irish-born writer James Joyce (1882 - 1941) lived in a variety of cities in Europe, but was always tied to Dublin, the city of his birth. It was the setting for many of his revolutionary and controversial works, and it was also where in 1904 he met Nora Barnacle, the woman who would eventually become his wife. This letter, written just months after Joyce first met Nora, shows the depth of his affection.

James Joyce To Nora Barnacle 15 August, 1904 My dear Nora, It has just struck me. I came in at half past eleven. Since then I have been sitting in an easy chair like a fool. I could do nothing. I hear nothing but your voice. I am like a fool hearing you call me 'Dear.' I offended two men today by leaving them coolly. I wanted to hear your voice, not theirs. When I am with you I leave aside my contemptuous, suspicious nature. I wish I felt your head on my shoulder. I think I will go to bed. I have been a half-hour writing this thing. Will you write something to me? I hope you will. How am I to sign myself? I won't sign anything at all, because I don't know what to sign myself. Recent Posts from the Acme Love Forums

Question: Nora Barnacle was the muse and wife of which Irish writer?
Answer: James Joyce